INTERSECTION INFLECTION

Opening of Portage and Main shows even seemingly insurmountable impasses can be overcome

The intersection at Portage and Main opened to pedestrians in June 2025, 46 years after its closure. (MIKAELA MACKENZIE / FREE PRESS)

THERE are places in a city that become more than places. Portage and Main is one of them. For generations of Winnipeggers, the intersection has represented downtown, traffic, development and civic identity. Its reopening to pedestrians in 2025, after 46 years of closure, was about more than crossing a street. It was a reminder that decisions made by one generation can shape the choices available to another — and that even seemingly permanent decisions can be reconsidered.

I have spent much of my professional life thinking about Winnipeg as a planner, working in public, private and non-profit settings. My PhD research gave me an opportunity to examine Portage and Main differently: not simply as a debate about cars and pedestrians, but as a window into how power operates in a city. I reviewed 569 archival documents spanning the 1960s to the present, interviewed 48 planners with experience in Winnipeg, and mapped the relationships between planners, politicians, developers, engineers, residents, businesses and advocacy groups.

What emerged was a story about how planning decisions become embedded in a city’s institutions, agreements, infrastructure, professional practices and political expectations — shaping not only what gets built, but who gets to influence what gets built.

The closure of Portage and Main in 1979 did not remain a decision confined to a particular political moment. Over time, it was reinforced by development agreements, physical infrastructure, property relationships, traffic-engineering practices, administrative routines, and public narratives about mobility and downtown revitalization. The people who made many of those original decisions eventually left office. The arrangements they created remained. Later planners inherited them.

This is what I call “embedded planning power.” Power is not exercised only when a politician casts a vote, a developer advances a proposal or a planner recommends an option. It accumulates. An agreement can outlast the government that signed it. Infrastructure can make one future easier and another more expensive. Professional hierarchies can determine whose expertise matters most, while familiar narratives can make established approaches seem inevitable.

The past does not simply constrain us because it happened. It constrains us because we build the future around it.

WHO SHAPES THE CITY?

MY research also led me to reconsider the role of planners themselves. Planning scholarship often asks what planners should do: advocate, facilitate, advise, mediate or provide technical expertise. But there is another question worth asking: What forms of influence does the planning system actually allow them to exercise?

The planners I interviewed described four broad patterns of behaviour. Some acted as commanders, shaping narratives, advising elected officials and championing a vision. Others were compromisers, building relationships, facilitating dialogue and finding common ground among competing interests. Some became subordinates, taking direction from elected officials and demonstrating accountability with follow through. Others operated as solitarians, gathering information, conducting analysis and providing technical clarity.

These are not personality types or a hierarchy of better and worse planners. They are different configurations of professional agency. A planner may lead in one circumstance and defer in another, depending on their relationships, authority, expertise and institutional environment.

The distinction matters because we often tell planners to be more courageous, collaborative or strategic without asking whether their organizations enable them to act that way. A planner can understand precisely what a city needs and still lack the authority, resources, relationships or political support to make it happen.

Portage and Main illustrates this challenge. For much of its history, planning occupied a relatively peripheral position in a network where engineering, development interests and political decision-making often carried greater influence. That position was not inevitable. It was shaped by institutional decisions, the prioritization of traffic and engineering rationalities, changes in planning resources and organizational status, and development arrangements that gave other actors considerable influence.

Position is itself a product of power. This finding has implications beyond Winnipeg. If planners occupy the margins of a decision, we should ask why. If engineers dominate a conversation, what has made their expertise central? If developers have privileged access to decision-makers, what arrangements sustain that influence?

The question being asked also determines who becomes powerful in answering it. Frame Portage and Main as a traffic problem, and engineering expertise moves to the centre. Frame it as a development opportunity, and property and economic interests become more prominent. Frame it around accessibility, urban design or civic identity, and planning knowledge becomes more consequential. The framing of a problem is itself a form of power.

RECOGNIZING CONSTRAINTS WE REPRODUCE

INSTITUTIONS do more than constrain planners. Planners can also reproduce the very arrangements that limit their influence.

When a particular way of working becomes routine, professionals may stop questioning its origins. A planner who learns that an issue is “not really planning” may withdraw from the conversation. Someone who sees certain stakeholders consistently influencing decisions may focus on incremental improvements rather than challenging the underlying relationships. An organization may continue a practice long after the circumstances that created it have changed.

Power does not always need to tell people what they cannot do. Over time, it can teach them what they should not attempt.

This is not a criticism of individual planners. Often, these behaviours are rational responses to professional realities. Public-sector planners may face political expectations or restrictions on speaking publicly. Private-sector planners may worry about losing clients or damaging relationships with government. Telling someone simply to “speak truth to power” overlooks the institutional conditions that determine the consequences of doing so.

But if institutions can reproduce power, they can also interrupt it.

The reopening of Portage and Main demonstrates that embedded power is not permanent power. The agreements, infrastructure, political narratives and professional assumptions that sustained the closure for decades did not disappear overnight. They were challenged, renegotiated and eventually changed.

The chains were real. But they were not unbreakable. That is an important lesson for Winnipeg as it considers its future. The question is not whether power will exist in planning. It always will. The question is how that power is organized, whose interests it serves and whether the institutions of the city can adapt when circumstances change.